Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare was an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. He was a leading international literary figure and intellectual, focusing on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
Kadare is regarded by some as one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a universal voice against totalitarianism. Living in Albania during a time of strict censorship, he devised stratagems to outwit Communist censors who had banned three of his books, using devices such as parable, myth, fable, folk-tale, allegory, and legend, sprinkled with double-entendre, allusion, insinuation, satire, and coded messages. In 1990, to escape the Communist regime and its Sigurimi secret police, he defected to Paris. From the 1990s he was asked by both major political parties in Albania to become a consensual President of the country, but declined. In 1996, France made him a foreign associate of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and in 2016, he was a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur recipient.
Kadare was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 1998, the Herder Prize; in 2005, the inaugural Man Booker International Prize; in 2009, the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts; and in 2015, the Jerusalem Prize. He was awarded the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2020. His nominating juror for the Neustadt Prize wrote: "Kadare is the successor of Franz Kafka. No one since Kafka has delved into the infernal mechanism of totalitarian power and its impact on the human soul in as much hypnotic depth as Kadare." His writing has also been compared to that of Nikolai Gogol, George Orwell, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Balzac. His works have been published in 45 languages. The New York Times wrote that he was a national figure in Albania comparable in popularity perhaps to Mark Twain in the United States, and that "there is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book".
He was the husband of author Helena Kadare and the father of United Nations Ambassador and UN General Assembly Vice-president Besiana Kadare. In 2023 he was granted citizenship of Kosovo, by president Vjosa Osmani.
Early life and education
Ismail Kadare was born on 28 January 1936, in the Kingdom of Albania during the reign of King Zog I. He was born in Gjirokastër, a historic Ottoman fortress–city in the mountains, made up of tall stone houses in what is today southern Albania, a dozen miles from the border with Greece. He lived there on a crooked, narrow street known as Lunatics' Lane.Ismail's parents were Halit Kadare, a post office employee, and Hatixhe Dobi, a homemaker, who had married in 1933 when she was 17. On his mother's side, his great-grandfather was a Bejtexhi of the Bektashi Order, known as Hoxhë Dobi. Though he was born into a Muslim family, he was an atheist.
Three years after Kadare was born, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini's troops invaded Albania and ousted the king. Italian rule followed. He was nine years old when the Italian troops were withdrawn, and the communist-led People's Socialist Republic of Albania was established.
Kadare attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastër. He then studied Languages and Literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956, he received a teacher's diploma. He lived in Tirana until moving to France in 1990.
Literary career
Early
At age 11, Kadare read William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. He recalled years later: "Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play."He soon became entranced by literature. At age 12, Kadare wrote his first short stories, which were published in the Pionieri journal in Tirana, a communist magazine for children. In 1954 he published his first collection of poems, Frymëzime djaloshare ''. In 1957 he published a poetry collection entitled Ëndërrimet.
At 17, Kadare won a poetry contest in Tirana, which allowed him to travel to Moscow to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. He studied literature during the Khrushchev era, doing post-graduate work from 1958 to 1960. His training had as its goal for him to become a communist writer and "engineer of human souls", to help construct a culture of the new Albania. In Moscow he met writers united under the banner of Socialist Realism—a style of art characterized by the idealized depiction of revolutionary communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat. Kadare also had the opportunity to read contemporary Western literature, including works by Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ernest Hemingway. He rejected the canons of Socialist Realism and committed himself internally to writing as opposed to dogmatism. He also cultivated contempt for the nomenklatura, an attitude which, he later wrote, was the product of his youthful arrogance rather than of considered political opposition. During his time in the Soviet Union, Kadare published a collection of poetry in Russian, and in 1959 also wrote his first novel, Qyteti pa reklama, a critique of socialist careerism in Albania.
Kadare returned home in October 1960 on Albanian orders, before Albania's breaking of political and economic ties with the USSR. He lived for the next 30 years in Tirana, in an apartment which now houses the Ismail Kadare House museum and archives. He worked as a journalist, became editor-in-chief of the literary periodical Les Lettres Albanaises, and then contributed to the literary review Drita for five years, while embarking on a literary career of his own.
At that time Kadare had a reputation for poetry. In 1961 he published a volume of poetry entitled Shekulli im. His work was particularly popular with Albanian youth. His future wife Helena, then a schoolgirl, wrote a fan letter to the young writer, which eventually led to their marriage in 1963.
Kadare wrote one of his earliest pieces in the 1960s, a poem entitled "The Princess Argjiro". Locally inspired, the poem transforms the centuries-old myth of the legendary 15th century Princess Argjiro, who was said to have jumped off Gjirokastër Castle along with her child to avoid being captured by the Ottomans. The poem was denounced and an official reader's report was commissioned, which maintained he had committed historical and ideological errors. Kadare was criticized implicitly for disregarding socialist literary principles.
In 1962, Kadare published an excerpt from his first novel as a short story under the title '' in a communist youth magazine. It was banned immediately after publication, contributing to his reputation for "decadence".
In 1963, at 26 years of age, Kadare published his novel The General of the Dead Army, about an army general and a priest who, 20 years after World War II, are sent to Albania to locate the remains of fallen Italian soldiers and return them to Italy for burial. The novel faced criticism by Albanian literary critics for flouting socialist ideals and for its dark tone. The novel was thus in stark contrast to those of other Albanian writers of the time, who glorified the Communist revolution. The novel inspired three films: Luciano Tovoli's 1983 The General of the Dead Army in Italian starring Marcello Mastroianni and Michel Piccoli, Bertrand Tavernier's 1989 Life and Nothing But in French starring Philippe Noiret, and Dhimitër Anagnosti's 1989 The Return of the Dead Army in Albanian starring Bujar Lako. Though it is his best-known novel, and Kadare viewed it as "good literature", he did not view it as his best work.
In 1964 he wrote Përse mendohen këto male. His next short novel, The Monster, published in the literary magazine Nëntori in 1965, was labelled "decadent" and banned upon publication; it was Kadare's second ban.
By the mid-1960s, the cultural censorship thaw of the early part of the decade was over, and conditions changed dramatically. In 1967, Albania launched its own Cultural Revolution. Kadare was exiled for two years along with other Albanian writers to Berat in the countryside, to learn about life alongside the peasants and workers. Two Albanian dramatists were at the time also sentenced to eight years in prison each. Albanian writers and artists encountered indifference from the world outside Albania, which did not speak in their support.
International breakthrough (1970–1980)
The General of the Dead Army was Kadare's first great success outside Albania. The French translation by Isuf Vrioni, published in 1970 in Paris by publisher Albin Michel, led to Kadare's international breakthrough. In the ironic novel, an Italian general and an Italian Army priest return to Albania 20 years after World War II, to find and bring back to Italy for final burial there the bodies of Italian soldiers killed in the war. The French publishing house published the novel without Kadare's knowledge or permission, as Albania at the time was not a signatory to the Universal Copyright Convention and there was no copyright protection on the text. Once the book appeared in France, it was translated into most European languages. By 1977 it had been translated into over 20 languages, with the Albanian communist press hailing it as "one of the most successful translations of the world of the 70s".After the success of the novel in the West in 1970, the older generation of Albanian writers and dogmatic literary critics became extremely embittered against the "darling of the West": "This novel was published by the bourgeoisie and this cannot be accepted", said a report by the Albanian secret police. Kadare's enemies in the secret police and the old guard of the Albanian Politburo referred to him as an agent of the West, which was one of the most dangerous accusations that could be made in Albania. He continued to publish in his home country and became widely promoted there, with frequent references in the Albanian press to new releases and translations of his work, being hailed as a "hero of the new Albanian literature". Kadare's work was described as "treat many problems preoccupying" Albanian society, and as "mak use of the revolution as the organizing element of his writing". He was also lauded as having a "revolutionary drive" which "keeps pace with life and fights against old ideas".
In 1971 Kadare published the novel Chronicle in Stone, in which the narrator is a young Albanian boy whose old stone city hometown is caught up in World War II, and successively occupied by Greek, Italian, and German forces. The novel has been described as magic realism. John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, that it was "a thoroughly enchanting novel — sophisticated and accomplished in its poetic prose and narrative deftness, yet drawing resonance from its roots in one of Europe's most primitive societies". The book was heavily publicized in the Albanian press, both domestically and in magazines aimed at promoting Albanian socialism and culture to an international audience, such as New Albania.
Throughout the 1970s, Kadare began to work more with myths, legends, and the distant past, often drawing allusions between the Ottoman Empire and present-day Albania. At this time, he also worked as an editor and contributor to New Albania, an arts and culture magazine which sought to promote Albanian socialism to a worldwide audience.
In 1970, Kadare published Kështjella which was celebrated in both Albania and Western Europe, seeing a translation into French in 1972. It detailed the war between Albanians and Ottomans during the time of Skanderbeg.
In 1978 he published the novel The Three-Arched Bridge, a political parable set in 1377 in the Balkans, narrated by an Albanian monk. The New York Times called it "an utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise".
After Kadare offended the authorities with a political poem entitled "The Red Pasha" in 1975 that poked fun at the Albanian Communist bureaucracy, he was denounced, narrowly avoiding being shot, and was ultimately sent to do manual labour in a remote village deep in the central Albania countryside for a short time. After his return to Tirana, Kadare increasingly began to publish short novellas.
In 1980 Kadare published the novel Broken April, about the centuries-old tradition of hospitality, blood feuds, and revenge killing in the highlands of north Albania in the 1930s. The New York Times, reviewing it, wrote: "Broken April is written with masterly simplicity in a bardic style, as if the author is saying: Sit quietly and let me recite a terrible story about a blood feud and the inevitability of death by gunfire in my country. You know it must happen because that is the way life is lived in these mountains. Insults must be avenged; family honor must be upheld." The novel was adapted into the 2001 Brazilian film Behind the Sun by filmmaker Walter Salles, set in 1910 Brazil and starring Rodrigo Santoro, which was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The flashback portions of the 2006 Telugu feature film Pournami were also inspired by Behind the Sun, which in turn, was based on the novel.